Thursday, March 27, 2014

This is my open letter - mailed Thursday 27 March 2014 - to Anumita Roy Chowdhury of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) who is participating tomorrow in the "foundation-day" function of Public Health Fraud of India (PHFI).

Dear Ms Anumita Roy
Chowdhury,

Executive Director
(research and advocacy)

Centre for Science and
Environment (CSE)

New Delhi

It's interesting to
find your name on the list of participants in Public Health Foundation of
India's foundation-day celebrations on Friday, 28 March 2014 – not surprising
though given A.K. Shiva Kumar’s presence on the boards of both CSE and PHFI.

Your and CSE's work on
air pollution is a bit of a contrast to Anand Mahindra-chaired PHFI. It can't
be easy avoiding Big Business these days.

Mukesh Ambani - from
whom India buys a lot of 'gas' for American dollars - used to be one of the
members of PHFI governing board. I am sure his affairs at PHFI board are now
being looked after well by R.A. Mashelkar, former Director General of CSIR and now a member of the Board of Directors
of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL).

Mashelkar is, of
course, a versatile and hard-working personality. How does he manage to juggle
Ambani's job with also being a Director at Tata Motors, Hindustan Unilever,
Thermax Ltd, KPIT Cummins Infosystems, IKP Knowledge Park, Piramal Enterprises
(formerly Piramal Healthcare) and several private limited companies I cannot
begin to imagine.

He is even a Director
of Reliance Gene Medix Plc., a company incorporated outside India.

I am sure Mashelkar --
like other capable members of the PHFI board (such as Shiva Kumar, who’s been
on your CSE, Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and Rajat Gupta’s ISB,
Harpal Singh of private hospital chain Fortis, and N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys who is
'PE'-invested into Wellspring Healthcare and Manipal Global) - has a supremely
delicate understanding of avoidance of conflict of interests.

Not very long ago,
former McKinsey head Rajat Gupta gave a demonstration of that delicate
understanding. He resigned from the chairmanship of PHFI even before he was
arrested by the FBI on charges of securities fraud. He knew his interests as a
securities fraud accused could conflict with his responsibilities as chairman
of PHFI board, filled as it has been with such Cabinet-rank eminences as Montek
Singh Ahluwalia (Deputy Chair of the Planning Commission) and T.K.A. Nair
(Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Principal Secretary).

And Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh was very careful to take as long as a few weeks after
"launching" PHFI on 28 March 2006 on behalf of worthies led by Rajat
Gupta to plough into this "public health" club his government's
whole-hearted support, starting with Rs 65 crore 'grant-in-aid' from the public
treasury.

It's like a luscious cherry on a rich (Bill) Gateau - baked lovingly by Ashok Alexander who's been
loyally serving Microsoft founder on the board of PHFI ever since joining Rajat
Gupta in putting together this exclusive club. (A "friend, mentor and
occasional coach” is how Alexander described Gupta - now going to jail - at the trial
of the latter in Galleon insider trading case.)

The rest, as they say,
is glorious history of hundreds of crores of more public “grants-in-aid”,
lucrative unbid contracts, generous giveaways of parcels of land, approvals,
authorizations, ‘research’ institute status from DSIR,
stewardship/membership of each of the crucial health policy committees, a
cart blanche to recast India's "public health".... leading up to the
auspicious day on 28 March 2014 when you will rub shoulders with the likes of
Prof. Michael Greenstone of MIT at the panel discussion on "air pollution
and public health".

Talking about Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh, it’s but an insignificant detail that he and his
government consistently used falsehood and fraud in turning a private club into
an enormously privileged "public health" body by claiming, according
to their convenience, to the Parliament and the citizens that PHFI was a
‘Public-Private Partnership’ or an ‘autonomous body’ (even “autonomous PPP”)
while it was (and is) neither.

I understand fully
that it’s rather difficult to improve "public health" without engaging
in falsehood and fraud.

I'd be remiss if I
fail to point out here the role that McKinsey & Co. -- whose men, now
Gautam Kumra and Prashanth Vasu, continue to be an inalienable part of PHFI
board right from the very beginning -- has been playing in improving the
"public health" of various countries, such as the United Kingdom.

The Daily Mail
reported in February 2012, for instance, that McKinsey played a key role in
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s "reforms" to recast UK's National
Health Service (NHS).

"The firm that
hijacked the NHS: MoS investigation reveals extraordinary extent of
international management consultant's role in Lansley's health reforms,"
the Daily Mail headlined.

The British newspaper
used the Freedom of Information Act to reveal McKinsey’s myriad links to the
"reforms". For instance, proposals were drawn up by McKinsey and
included in the reform legislation wholesale. "One document says the firm
has used its privileged access to ‘share information’ with its corporate
clients – which include the world’s biggest private hospital firms – who are
now set to bid for health service work."

"The company is
already benefiting from contracts worth undisclosed millions with GPs arising
from the Bill."

Having been writing
about PHFI since March 2011 (when I published my first article, titled,
'Manmohan Singh's Public-Private Partnership with Rajat Gupta'), I should also
point out that K. Srinath Reddy, with whom you'd share the dais tomorrow, has
been so enthusiastic a "president" that he doesn't hesitate to forge
documents and send them to information seekers under the RTI Act, like he did
with me. ('Annexure B' in the files attached with mail is Srinath Reddy's work
of art in forgery.)

It’s also a mere fact that PHFI cocked a snook at the RTI law for six years before the Central Information
Commission indicted and fined this private club scrounging off public money for
non-compliance and expressed its "dismay" that "the highest
levels of public servants in India” – i.e. Manmohan, Montek and the rest – “did
not accept the citizen’s enforceable right to information in PHFI, despite the
government substantially funding it and exercising some control".

(The CIC decision of
14 February 2012 is attached with this mail.)

I feel almost
embarrassed to be expanding "PHFI" to "Public Health Fraud of
India" in my most recent article (published 24 March 2014) and finding out
in my investigations that it's an organization wholly fraudulent in its
conception, formation and operation.

I'd sent letters about
PHFI's deeds - such as fraud and forgery - to the health ministry and several
members of the board of this private club, including Amartya Sen, the venerable
"Nobel Laureate". My complaint to the health ministry elicited only
an acknowledgement, no action. None of the board members, Amartya Sen and
SEWA's Mirai Chatterjee included, chose to acknowledge my letter. A copy of the
letter to the health ministry is attached with this mail and a copy of the
email sent to Sen is pasted at the bottom.

Also attached with
this mail is a PDF containing information obtained through RTI -- forwarded to
me by Dr. Arun Gupta of IBFAN (breastfeeding network) and AACI (Alliance
Against Conflict of Interest) -- on PHFI's links with Pfizer, Merck Sharp &
Dohme Pharmaceuticals, and Johnson & Johnson.

An early article on
PHFI's formation and objectives authored by Prof. C. Sathyamala, a well-known
Indian public health activist (who wrote 'Taking Sides', a book that critically
evaluates the problems with the Indian health care system), is attached with
this mail.

More of my articles on
this "public health" club can be read on the following links.

Monday, March 24, 2014

This article - which I wrote in October 2012 and is still incomplete - is a sequel to two articles I'd published in March 2011 and September 2012 whose links are pasted below.http://kbforyou.blogspot.in/2011/03/manmohan-singhs-public-private.htmlhttp://kbforyou.blogspot.in/2012/09/with-phfi-falsification-is-truth.htmlThis series of articles explains what I call the 'Public Health Fraud of India' or PHFI whose foremost perpetrator is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. As I noted above, this article was written in October 2012, but could not be completed then or subsequently taken up for completion, for various reasons. It's, however, quite substantial in its current form and is an important part of the painful research I'd done on PHFI, which must be shared with those who need this information now. Several public health-related people have been requesting me to publish this article at the earliest.So, rather than waiting more for the time when I'd be able to take it to its final form, I am publishing the article in its current incomplete form and hope to publish supplementary material in my succeeding posts.The article pasted below explains that Public Health Foundation of India (or PHFI whose 'F' should always be read as 'fraud' rather than 'foundation') is neither a 'public-private partnership' (PPP) nor an 'autonomous body', as the Manmohan Singh government claimed repeatedly.That is, PHFI's formation and existence had nothing, whatsoever, to do with the PPP rules notified by the finance ministry. And PHFI's supposed status as an 'autonomous body' has nothing to do with the General Financial Rules (GFR), 2005, which apply to the formation of 'autonomous bodies'.Manmohan Singh government falsely claimed alternatively, within and outside Parliament, that PHFI is a "PPP" or "autonomous body" or "autonomous PPP", thus committing a gargantuan fraud on the people as well as the Parliament - the latter being a fraudulent breach of Parliamentary privilege.Equally massive is the falsehood and fraud that Manmohan Singh and his government used in first posing PHFI as an organization that was to engage only in education, research and career-building and then expanding its remit to include anything and everything that can be pushed under the rubric of "public health", including policy making and legislation drafting. PHFI is now 'the government' vastly more powerful than the central ministry of health and family welfare. This private club, which sponges on hundreds of crore of grants and other public support, has come to be an unelected and unlawful 'government', accountable only to a coterie of business owners who control it. Manmohan Singh, who's personally responsible for creating and supporting PHFI, is liable for prosecution for fraud and corruption, under various sections of various statutes, and should go to jail.A full investigation will reveal the full scale of this massive fraud and many subordinate frauds, such as the illegalities in the formation/registration of PHFI society and the large number of lucrative contracts and other benefits that have been granted to this illegal and fraudulent organization without following the rules of public procurement.Since I published my first article in March 2011, there has been huge pressure from the PMO on the mainstream media to prevent them from investigating further.I had given some of the contours of the fraud to a senior journalist from DNA, an award-winning scam buster who had contacted me in the middle of 2012, but nothing came out of that.

-----

New Delhi (October 2012): Last
June, when a US court held Rajat Gupta, the former head of McKinsey & Co,
guilty of securities fraud, the sword of justice also brushed past Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh himself.

Being the conviction of a
wheeler-dealer who has long had an “open door” to the PMO, the verdict of the
12-member jury represented a much closer encounter that Manmohan Singh or any
of his associates has had so far with penal justice; it was closer, in terms of
establishment of guilt, than the arrest and indictment of former telecom
minister A. Raja − who’s since been freed on bail − in 2G spectrum scam case.

The verdict was also a reminder
that if justice had indeed been allowed to run its course in India, many of the
high and mighty would find themselves in jail.

An RBI investigation revealed, for
instance, that Rajat Gupta, a US citizen since 1984, colluded with other
foreign investors in making an illicit purchase of shares in Tamilnad
Mercantile Bank and transferred his shares to another foreign investor in
violation of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

Manmohan Singh, to take another
example, has been abusing the prime ministerial office and public resources to
promote and support Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), a private club
put together by Gupta, as a policy making body under the wholly fraudulent
cover of a ‘public-private partnership’ (PPP).

While the Enforcement Directorate
continues to “look into” Gupta’s alleged wrongdoing more than two years after
it was reported by the RBI, Manmohan Singh being an Indian Prime Minister is virtually protected from any suggestion of
an independent inquiry of his misconduct, let alone an inquiry itself.

Gupta has a record of more dubious
dealings in India. And even without an inquiry a lot more is plainly evident in
Prime Minister’s dubious dealings with the businessman, who is set to be
sentenced on October 17, and his commercial network.

PHFI: an elaborate fraud

The most interesting manifestation
of Manmohan Singh’s association with Rajat Gupta is Public Health Foundation of
India (PHFI), an organization wholly fraudulent in its conception, formation,
objectives and operation. It is dominated by Big Business, but has been allowed
to thrive on hundreds of crores of public money.

PHFI has also been advertised,
fraudulently, as a “public-private partnership” in order to be given the
privileges of a governmental authority with no public accountability. In over
six years of its existence, PHFI has gone far in building its illegal empire
and exercising its baleful influence on public health policy and administration
with enormous costs to the citizens.

Based on information available in
the public domain and obtained through RTI, this article explains why PHFI is
an outright fraud on the citizens of India and a new low in the degradation of
the concept of democratic accountability that has taken place under Manmohan
Singh government. It shows how the government has been using terms like ‘PPP’
and ‘autonomous PPP’ to hoodwink the public and the Parliament about PHFI’s
formation, identity, privileges, area of work and influence.

The intent behind this fraud has
been to give powerful business interests a back-door entry into government, so
that they are able to shape public health policy to serve their narrow private
interests and gain control over public resources.

The establishment of PHFI also
betrays the contempt with which the current regime has treated public health of
over a billion people.

The illegal beginnings

The role of the government in
conceiving and planning PHFI remains a mystery with no attempt by the official
channels to explain how this organization was conjured up in early 2006.

(The morning after the “launch” of
PHFI by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Indian Express reported: “The PHFI
initiative has been collaboratively developed over the last two years under the
leadership of Rajat Gupta of McKinsey, the Ministry of Health and Family
Welfare and Srinath Reddy, head of the Department of Cardiology at AIIMS.”)

According to the information –
which is not free from dubiousness – released by PHFI under RTI Act, it was
registered as a society (under the Societies Registration Act of 1860) on 08
February 2006 in Delhi by the following eight men who also formed its first
governing body.

(a)Rajat
Gupta, then a senior partner in McKinsey. He was the prime mover in the
creation of PHFI and became the chairman of the governing board within weeks of
the registration of the organization. Gupta was compelled to relinquish the
post in March 2011 after being charged in the US with involvement in Galleon
insider trading ring.

(b)Gautam
Kumra of McKinsey. He has been a member of PHFI’s governing body from the very
beginning.

(c)Prashanth
Vasu of McKinsey.

(d)Ashok
Alexander, country director of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which he
joined in 2003 after 16 years at McKinsey. Alexander has also been a member of PHFI’s
governing body from the very beginning. He described Rajat Gupta as a “friend,
mentor and occasional coach” at the trial of the latter in Galleon insider
trading case.

(e)K
Srinath Reddy, then a cardiologist at AIIMS. He has been heading Manmohan’s official
medical panel and been Gupta’s right hand man in all matters PHFI. He used his
access to the Prime Minister to wangle an unlawful five-year “deputation” to be
made the president of PHFI. Having taken voluntary retirement from AIIMS after
the five-year term, he continues full time as PHFI president at a salary of Rs
60 lakh per annum plus perks.

(f)RA
Mashelkar, then Director-General of Council of Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR). He has been associated with American India Foundation and IndianSchool
of Business, both of which organizations list Gupta as one of their founders.
He has also been a member of the board of PHFI since its inception.

(g)Ajay
Bahl of law firm AZB & Partners.

(h)Raman
Sharma of law firm AZB & Partners.

Two of the eight ‘main objects’ that PHFI’s memorandum of
association lists are setting up public health institutes and “driving”
research and consultancy for “shaping public health policies” through the help
of central and state governments, corporate houses and other agencies.

PHFI claims its governing body enlarged itself to 24 members
− who were drawn primarily from Big Business, corporate-funded international
foundations (like Gates Foundation) and the central government − on 27 March
2006, i.e. a day before the organization was “launched”.

The enlarged board, shows the information released by PHFI,
had four officials of the ministry of health and family welfare: Prasanna Hota,
Secretary, Nirmal Ganguly, Director General, Indian Council of Medical
Research, RK Srivastava, Director General, Health Services, and K Sujatha Rao,
DG, National AIDS Control Organization.

That takes, together with Reddy and Mashelkar, government
officials on PHFI board to six.

In comes the Prime Minister

Manmohan “launched” PHFI on 28 March 2006 in a function
attended by his ministerial colleagues (Anbumani Ramadoss, Panabaka Lakshmi,
Kapil Sibal), top bureaucrats, K. Srinath Reddy (then senior cardiologist at AIIMS), Rajat Gupta (head of McKinsey & Co.), Barry R.
Bloom (Dean of Harvard School of Public Health), Amartya Sen (the Nobel
laureate whose presence on the PHFI board has played its part in camouflaging
the real identity of the organization) and other worthies.

In his 1732-words speech, the Prime Minister referred twice
to PHFI as a “public-private partnership” without ever naming any of the public
partner(s) or the private partner(s). He made no reference to any contractual
arrangement between the two sides nor outlined the contribution of any party to
the purported PPP. He, however, did thank “all donors” including “the
corporates who have contributed to this laudable effort” and “several
international academic institutions of high repute”.

(No one is better placed than Manmohan Singh to know the
specific meaning that the Government of India attaches to “public-private
partnerships”, including the ones in the ‘social sector’. At the time of his
speech, he was the chairman of the Committee on Infrastructure, the highest
decision-making body on PPP policy matters then.)

He also said, “The setting up of the PHFI presents a unique
opportunity to develop innovative models of public-private partnership in major
social sector programmes.”

Speaking of the need for “managers of health and not just of
diseases”, Manmohan commended the 7-weeks-old organization (whose fuller
governing body came into existence the previous day) “in taking this initiative
to bridge a critical gap in health education and in blazing a trail by setting
up a series of public health schools”. He congratulated Rajat Gupta “for the efforts
that he has made to give concrete shape to this idea”.

The Prime Minister also set PHFI sweeping objectives,
calling on it “to develop an Indian agenda both in academics and research,” and
hoping that it “will invest in capacity-building in existing public health
institutions across the country” and “our state governments will find it
beneficial to partner your initiative”.

Unexplained largesse

On 6 July
2006, i.e. 14 weeks after Manmohan conjured up PHFI out of thin
air, the government announced that the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs
(chaired by the PM) had approved a “one time contribution of Rs 65 crore to the
initial Rs 200 crore corpus of PHFI”.

A notification issued by the CCEA said: “The PHFI basically
aims to improve the public health human resource capacity and advocacy in
India” by doing the following (seven items under three headings).

(i) Strengthening Education in Public
Health: (a) Building new world class institutions of public health in India,
(b) Strengthening existing such institutions, both within the government and
outside, (c) Creating a critical mass of high quality faculty in the field of
public health.

(ii) Setting Standards in Public
Health Education: Improving quality of public health education, by clearly
defining academic standards in public health education.

(iii) Strengthening Research and
Policy in Public Health: (a) Conducting high impact, India relevant research in
public health, (b) Using the research to empower national programme and enable
appropriate policy formulation, (c) Working with the governments (central and
state), as also the private sector, to create meaningful career tracks for
public health professionals.

Interestingly, the notification of 06 July 2006 contains no
descriptor for PHFI. The organization is neither described as a “public-private
partnership” nor is there a mention of any agreement between the public and
private partners that a PPP would require.

There is also no explanation as to the nature of the “one
time contribution” of Rs 65 crore. What justified this expenditure of public
money? Why was this “one time contribution” needed to be made? What made PHFI
deserving of this governmental support? Who asked for it, on what grounds, in
what form of proposal? What did that proposal, if any, contain? What were the
terms and conditions governing this “one time contribution”?

None of these questions is addressed in the notification,
which adds that the rest of the corpus “is being generated” from Gates
Foundation (Rs 65 crore) and “approximately Rs 80-90 crore is being generated
from an assortment of high net worth of Indians from all over the world”.

The to-do list is also very interesting, containing as it
does only those items that are related to education, research and careers in
public health, and nothing else.

It would indeed be a stretch to interpret any of the seven
listed items to mean that PHFI was to directly participate in policy
formulation or enjoy the privilege of being awarded government projects without
competition or receive foreign aid as part of the agreements that the
Government of India has signed with the foreign governments – though that is
what has actually transpired.

Money first, plan later

On 28 July 2006, the ministry of health and family welfare
issued a letter to K Srinath Reddy, President of PHFI, informing him that the
“competent authority has approved the proposal for one time grant of Rs 65
crore to the PHFI corpus”.

The letter asked for the following seven items of
information to be furnished “in order to facilitate the release of funds”: (a)
Roadmap for the activities, (b) Progress achieved in receipt of fund from
abroad and within India as indicated during the launch on 28 March 2006 for the
corpus, (c) Status of getting possession of land and plan to start the first
school, (d) The decision on the number of schools to be built, (e) Action plan
for curriculum design and development, (f) Action plan for strengthening the collaborative
arrangements with the existing Indian institutions engaged in public health
education, (g) Action plan for demand survey in states for public health
professionals passing out of PHFI schools.

What is immediately noticeable in this letter is the
introduction of the word “proposal” for the planned financial support for PHFI,
without an explanation as to when and where it originated and what it
contained. And “one time grant” has replaced the earlier usage, “one time
contribution.”

Obviously, the government was determined to pour public
funds into PHFI anyhow and decided in just 22 days since the 06 July
notification that the “one time contribution” would have to be clothed as a
grant-in-aid.

Positioning the largesse as grant-in-aid would mean that
PHFI would now have to be described as an “autonomous body” in order for the
government support to pass muster.

The descriptor “public-private partnership” would be toned
down for a while after which it would be used together with “autonomous body” –
as a new term invented especially for PHFI – or interchangeably.

The 28 July letter also reveals the absurdity of the
situation − in PM-headed CCEA and then the “competent authority” approving a
large public investment in a non-entity even before ascertaining basic facts
such as its “roadmap of activities” and “action plans”. This charade only
serves to betray the larger game of the creation of PHFI as a front for a
network of corporate interests, which then waits to be legitimized and propped
up by the government with public money and other kinds of support.

Also revealing is PHFI being asked to furnish information on
“progress achieved in receipt of fund from abroad and within India as indicated
during the launch on 28 March 2006 for the corpus” − four months after the
Prime Minister “launched” the organization and thanked “all donors who have
graciously contributed to this noble effort”.

It is noteworthy that the seven items of information
contained in the 28 July letter also deal with only education, research and
careers in public health, and nothing else.

Misleading the Parliament

On 24
November 2006, in reply to a query, Panabaka Lakshmi, the then
minister of state for health, informed the Rajya Sabha of the decision of the
government to support PHFI.

“The Government has decided to support the PHFI in setting
up of world class Institutes of Public Health in India. PHFI is an autonomous
body. The Government of India proposes to contribute as one-time grant up to Rs
65 crore only to the initial Rs 200 crore PHFI corpus. PHFI initially proposes
to set up two schools. The locations have yet to be decided by PHFI,” an
official press release quoted Lakshmi as informing the Rajya Sabha.

Two obvious points to note in this statement are that PHFI
has once again been described as an organization that will engage only in
education-related work and the descriptor “autonomous body” has been introduced
with no mention of “public-private partnership”.

Did the minister mean that PHFI was an “autonomous body” as
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is an autonomous body under the
ministry of health?

Neither the ministry, however, has ever listed PHFI as an
“autonomous body” on its website nor has PHFI − with top-most health ministry
officials on its board − ever described itself as an autonomous body under the
ministry.

ICMR, National Institute of Health and Family Welfare
(NIHFW) and several other organizations describe themselves as autonomous
bodies under the jurisdiction of the ministry and are subject to CAG audit and
the RTI Act 2005.

PHFI has neither been asked to submit to regular public
audits nor to meet the statutory requirements for transparency, though it was
compelled by an order of the Central Information Commission (CIC), passed on 14 February 2012, to start
complying with the RTI Act.

Further, in the matter of setting up of autonomous bodies,
the very first principle that General Financial Rules 2005 require the central
government to adhere to reads: “No new autonomous institutions should be created
by ministries or departments without the approval of the Cabinet”.

The GFR 2005 say: “Stringent criteria should be followed for
setting up of new autonomous organizations and the type of activities to be
undertaken by them. The Ministry or Department should examine in detail; (a)
whether the activities proposed to be taken up are necessary at all; (b) whether
these activities, if necessary, need to be undertaken by setting up an
autonomous organisation only or whether these could be performed by the concerned
government agency or any other organisation already existing.”

These rules also say that autonomous bodies with a budgetary
support of more than Rs five crores per annum should be required to enter into
an MoU with the ministry or department, spelling out the “output targets” and
“input requirements”.

No Cabinet approval

There is nothing in the public domain to show that Cabinet
approval was taken for setting up PHFI. Indeed, the government would have us
believe that it had no role to play in bringing together the eight men who
registered PHFI as a society on 8
February 2006.

The CCEA decision to give Rs 65 crore to PHFI came nearly
five months after the registration with no mention of any Cabinet approval or
use of the descriptor “autonomous body”.

Nor is any “stringent criterion” evident in CCEA deciding to
make a contribution of Rs 65 crore to an organization registered few weeks ago
by a bunch of manipulators and front men feigning an interest in improving
India’s public health without any expertise or experience in this vital area of
public policy and administration.

There is no publicly available proof of any ministry having
signed an MoU with PHFI to make the latter spell out its “output targets” and
“input requirements” in line with GFR 2005.

Lying to the Parliamentary panel

Considering the demand for grants (2006-07), the
Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare “cautioned” the
government – in relation to PHFI which the department concerned described as a
“Public-Private Partnership” – that “the track record of private sector
participation in health sector has not been very helpful so far as public at
large is concerned”. A number of corporate hospitals had failed
“miserably” to provide free treatment to the poor after having received land
from the government at cheap rates, said the panel and pointed out that the “so
called public-private sector” had penetrated the state health
systems also.

“The committee is not much convinced by the contention of
the department that this experiment will be confined to the area of public
(medical) education only. The committee would like to be apprised about the
full details of this initiative.”

The government responded by saying that “PHFI is created for
capacity building in public health education, training and research”.

Here the government is clearly assuring the parliamentary
panel that PHFI would only engage in
educational and research work and that’s all there was to the “experiment”.

That was a patently false assurance as PHFI has been engaged
directly in formulation of public health policy by being given membership of
all important committees of the government.

For example, PHFI acted – at full public cost – as the
secretariat for the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage that
was chaired by its president K Srinath Reddy and whose report is currently
being considered by the government.

Belying its assurance, the government has also been granting
lucrative assignments to PHFI without any competitive bidding.

For instance, PHFI charged the government more than Rs 1.68
crore for developing healthy-india.org website which gives vitally useful
health tips, such as the benefits of eating home-cooked food, washing hands
after using the toilet, and keeping the nails short and clean.

More falsification

The government told the Parliamentary standing committee
that PHFI was managed by an “independent governing board” that had three representatives
of the health ministry. It added: “TKA Nair, Principal Secretary to Prime
Minister; MS Ahluwalia, Vice Chairman, Planning Commission; Sujata Rao,
AS&PD, NACO (National AIDS Control Organization); Dr. Mashelkar, DG of
CSIR, are also members of the governing board. The presence of the officials
from government would ensure that the decisions taken in PHFI are in consonance
with the objectives for which PHFI has been supported by Government of India”.

That assurance is also based on falsehood. The rules and
regulations of PHFI have ensured that the government has never had anything
more than a cosmetic role to play in decisions made by the organization.

The rules not only limit the number of government
representatives on PHFI board to a meagre proportion of the total membership,
but also give non-government members (read Big Business) the super-majority to
decide who would be considered a “government representative” and, generally,
who should simply be thrown out of the governing body.

Until 28
October 2011, when rules were tweaked, persons affiliated with the
government (centre and states) could form no more than one third of the members
of the governing body “either in an individual or ex officio capacity as
determined by the governing body”. The actual government representation has
always been too paltry to be anywhere near one third.

“MS Ahluwalia is a member of the PHFI board as MS Ahluwalia,
not as deputy chair of the Planning Commission,” a counsel for PHFI explained
“individual capacity” to the CIC on 24 January 2012 at a hearing that this
writer attended. That makes “ex officio capacity” the only government
representation on PHFI board.

Since the rules require a majority vote of 51 per cent of
the membership of the governing body for decisions not amenable to consensus,
the government representatives stand no chance of ever influencing any decision
if enough non-government representatives don’t cooperate. A government
representative (or any other member) in the governing body can just be stripped
of their membership anytime by a simple majority of the members present and
voting.

Further eroding the ability of the government
representatives to play any meaningful role in PHFI’s decision making, the
changes effected in the rules on 28 October 2011 turned the executive committee
– its current strength being 15 – into the most powerful body within the
organization, with just one ex officio position for the government.

Again, as a foolproof safeguard against government
influence, the members of the executive committee who are affiliated with
central or state governments cannot be more than one third of the total
membership. As for the governing body whose current strength is 30, the changes
of 28 October gave just four ex officio positions to the government officials
(i.e. less than one seventh of the total membership).

While making the dubious claim that seven of its officials
were on the PHFI board, the government omitted, cleverly, to apprise the
Parliamentary panel of the important distinction between “ex officio” members
(which it had no more than three) and “individual capacity” members who by very
definition are not government representatives.

The Parliamentary panel was also assured, “It is expected
that all members of the governing board would ensure the functioning of the
Foundation as a professional organization and with complete transparency” −
more humbug.

Ahluwalia, TKA Nair (both of Minister of State rank and
nominated directly by Manmohan) and other government officials on PHFI board
have instead allowed PHFI to cock a snook at even basic canons of transparency
while continuing to scrounge off public resources and exert its sinister influence
on public health policy.

PHFI remained non-compliant with the RTI Act 2005 for over
six years of its existence until a CIC order insisted on compliance from 15
March 2012. In its order, information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi noted “with
dismay that the highest levels of public servants in India did not accept the citizen’s
enforceable right to information in PHFI, despite the government substantially
funding it and exercising some control”.

PHFI was broached again in Rajya Sabha on 31 August 2007.
This time Panabaka Lakshmi, the minister of state for health, described it as
an “autonomous public-private partnership.”

The Minister said: “It (PHFI) will not only train health
professionals, but will also assist in strengthening the existing institutions
in the public health sector, create a pool of excellent faculty, act as a think
tank for the Government providing inputs for policy initiatives and set
standards for public health education. The research programmes of PHFI would be
geared to facilitate policy and programme development in public health through
inter-disciplinary studies.”

While the Minister described PHFI as a “Public-Private
Partnership”, neither the PPP agreement, if any, has ever been made public nor
has there been a mention of how the private partner of this PPP was selected in
conformity with the elaborate rules and regulations governing PPPs.

Almost everything in the discipline of ‘economics’ – which itself
is a fraudulent concept cunningly abstracted from the wholeness of social
relations – flows from self-serving theories presented as ‘empirically-tested science’.
Hence a massive fraud. Here is an illustration.

The Bank of England has just let slip a 'secret' that shows
that the 'educated' people across the world have been fooled and lied to.

The 'revelation' confirms that the discipline of 'economics'
- which was probably taught to you and continues to be taught to your
sons/daughters - has long been perpetuating a fraud.

Here is that secret.

Money is nothing more than a few strokes on the computer
keyboard performed by a commercial bank - and not the hard-earned 'savings' of
ordinary folks like you, nor the currency printed by the government.

Yes. Most of the money in circulation is created not by the
savings of people like us, but by lending by the commercial banks, which is
accomplished, literally, by keying in a few numbers.

It's the bank lending (on interest) that creates deposits of
money in the economy, not the saving-deposits that make up the amounts lent.

This 'secret' has long been known to those who have been
complicit in the fraud (including, of course, the so called 'economists') or
those whose concerned voice could be drowned out by the fraudsters.

The implications of this 'revelation' are many and profound.
What it implies, among other things, is that a sovereign government can never -
never - be short of its own currency and the 'imperative' to 'balance' the
government 'budget' is a load of non-sense.

Portraying government 'budget' as any household budget is
pure fraud, a measure now used across the world, including India, by the
plutocratic/kleptocratic governments to deny the needy citizens public funds
for vital public services/projects and thus help their cronies operating in the
so called 'market'.

We can really have funds for all public services without any
limits! And the bogey about 'crowding out of private investment' and
'inflation' is, of course, all part of the worldwide propaganda and fraud.

To understand this fraud, read the article by David Graeber,
pasted below and published recently in The Guardian.

Also pasted in this mail are links to articles published by
New Economics Foundation (NEF) and by Positive Money, both of which
organizations have plenty of other lucid material on money and money creation
in today's world.

The Bank of England site can be checked for the material
they've published. Two videos they have produced can be watched on the links
pasted below.

The truth
is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it

The Bank
of England's dose of honesty throws the theoretical basis for austerity out the
window

By David Graeber, The Guardian, Tuesday 18 March 2014

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked
that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really
works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow
morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of
England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in
the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's
Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions
of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox
positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are
correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis
for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is,
consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all
respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks
then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs
willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional
reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in
reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow
more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But
it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is
why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could
print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the
resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos.

Institutions such as
the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate
the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to
directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund
private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk
about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say
"there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak
of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding
out" the private sector.

What the Bank of England admitted this week is
that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary:
"Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then
lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times,
the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is
central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's
backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really
just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that
effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind,
ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to
accept them in payment of taxes.

There's really no limit on how much banks could create,
provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught
short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take
the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans
out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a
whole, every loan just becomes another deposit.

What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from
the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really
does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since
the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced
that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing"
they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks,
without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of
money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but
how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow.
Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit,
if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after
all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out"
private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well,
one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run
the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's
possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics
that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer
afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just
consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent
them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something
the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand
which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether,
staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies.
If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if
Henry Ford was right.

The Bank of England has just published probably the most
accurate and clear accounts of how the modern monetary system works ever
written by a major central bank. The two articles are published in the Bank’s
prestigious 54 year-old Quarterly Bulletin series – the main channel it uses to
communicate its thinking to the public.

The good news is that the Bank agrees with the key aspects
of NEF’s book Where Does Money Come From? (first published 2011), which set out
to dispel many of the myths surrounding the process of money creation. Most importantly, their first article, on the
nature of modern money, states that:

“Most money in the modern economy is in the form of bank
deposits, which are created by commercial banks themselves… When a bank makes a loan to one of its
customers it simply credits the customer’s account with a higher deposit
balance. At that instant, new money is created…”

In the second article, on money creation and its limits, the
Bank lays to rest two of the great ‘money myths’. First, it dismisses the
commonly held view that when a bank makes a loan it is simply recycling someone
else’s savings. In fact, it is the other way round: “rather than banks lending
out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits —
the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks.”

The Bank also dismisses the ‘money multiplier’ theory, whereby
the central bank determines the quantity of loans and deposits in the economy
by controlling the quantity of central bank money:

“…the relationship between reserves and loans typically
operates in the reverse way to that described in some economics textbooks.
Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending
opportunities available to them…It is these lending decisions that determine
how many bank deposits are created by the banking system. The amount of bank
deposits in turn influences how much central bank money banks want to hold in
reserve (to meet withdrawals by the public, make payments to other banks, or
meet regulatory liquidity requirements), which is then, in normal times,
supplied on demand by the Bank of England.”

The first article explains that “commercial banks can create
new money because bank deposits are just IOUs of the bank; banks’ ability to
create IOUs is no different to anyone else in the economy…” (page 8). But what
makes bank IOUs different is that they are widely accepted as a medium of
exchange. Why? Because the State guarantees every person holding a bank account
the first £80,000 of these Bank IOUs. This “ensures that bank deposits are
trusted to be easily convertible into currency and can act as a medium of
exchange in its place.”

The Bank does not explain why private bank IOUs get this
special treatment, however. To understand this you’ll need to delve in to the
19th Century and the Banking Act of 1844. At the time private banks were free
to issue their own currency notes, a fact that was leading to repeated ‘bank
runs’ and resulting instability.

The Bank legislated to outlaw the issuance of private
banknotes and took up its monopoly position as the only agent able to issue
legal tender. It did not, however, prevent banks from creating deposits in
checking accounts, as described above. Since then, such IOUs have outgrown
currency issuance and currently account for 97% of the money in circulation.

Modern money creation can thus be seen as something of an
accident of history. As we point out in Where Does Money Come From?, there are
serious questions as to whether a relatively unregulated system dominated by
private money creation in the form of interest bearing debt is best suited to
the challenges facing modern humanity. In a speech in 2010, Mervyn King
suggested that “Of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the
one we have today.”

Of course, money creation is not completely without
constraints, as the Bank goes on to illustrate in the 2nd article. But the
weakness of monetary policy focussed on short- or long-term interest rates has
become clear in the last 5 years with lending to businesses remaining sluggish
despite historically low interest rates and £375bn worth of QE.

Perhaps it is time for a return to the quantitative controls on private money creation that were
standard in the 1950s and 1960s; or perhaps it is time to consider whether the
power to create money really should reside with private companies at all - the
UK banks’ record since 2008 begs the question.

Whatever the future though, the Bank of England should be
congratulated for setting the record straight on how the modern monetary system
works. These articles will stand the test of time as a reference for anyone
interested in both understanding and reforming our financial system.

They can be seen as a victory for those – like NEF, Positive
Money, Michael Kumhof, Adair Turner, Richard Werner and many others – who have
been working to educate policy makers and the general public about the
realities of our monetary system. And let’s hope they lead to a few textbooks
being ripped up.

Where does money come from?
In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But
how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood. The principal way
in which they are created is through commercial banks making loans: whenever a
bank makes a loan, it creates a deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby
creating new money. This description of
how money is created differs from the story found in some economics textbooks.

Believe it or not, this is an extract from the News Release
on new Quarterly Bulletin on Bank of England’s website!

We’ve been talking about the way money is created for the
last 4 years. We’ve also argued that the textbooks used in universities were
inaccurate. At last, there’s an official document and videos that we can send
to all those economists, academics, politicians and everyone who still shake
their head when we’re explaining this.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Follow the money trail. It leads to the West. Could clean-up
crusaders pretend otherwise?

Arvind Kejriwal says he'll fight corruption to the finish.
Jason Hickel of LSE is telling him that he'll then have to take on the mighty
West, the fountain-head of all corruption. Our corruption and kleptocracy, after
all, is fully underwritten by the US-led Empire.

Corruption
is by far not the main factor behind persisting poverty in the Global South.

Jason Hickel, Al Jazeera, 01 Feb 2014

Transparency International recently published their latest
annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), laid out in an eye-catching map of
the world with the least corrupt nations coded in happy yellow and the most
corrupt nations smeared in stigmatising red. The CPI defines corruption as
"the misuse of public power for private benefit", and draws its data
from 12 different institutions including the World Bank, Freedom House, and the
World Economic Forum.

When I first saw this map I was struck by the fact that most
of the yellow areas happen to be rich Western countries, including the United
States and the United Kingdom, whereas red covers almost the entirety of the
global South, with countries like South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia daubed
especially dark.

This geographical division fits squarely with mainstream
views, which see corruption as the scourge of the developing world (cue cliche
images of dictators in Africa and bribery in India). But is this storyline
accurate?

Many international development organisations hold that
persistent poverty in the Global South is caused largely by corruption among
local public officials. In 2003 these concerns led to the United Nations
Convention against Corruption, which asserts that, while corruption exists in
all countries, this "evil phenomenon" is "most destructive"
in the global South, where it is a "key element in economic underperformance
and a major obstacle to poverty alleviation and development".

There's only one problem with this theory: It's just not
true.

Corruption, superpower style

According to the World Bank, corruption in the form of
bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN
Convention, costs developing countries between $20bn and $40bn each year.
That's a lot of money. But it's an extremely small proportion - only about 3
percent - of the total illicit flows that leak out of public coffers. On the
other hand, multinational companies steal more than $900bn from developing
countries each year through tax evasion and other illicit practices.

This enormous outflow of wealth is facilitated by a shadowy
financial system that includes tax havens, paper companies, anonymous accounts,
and fake foundations, with the City of London at the very heart of it. Over 30
percent of global foreign direct investment is booked through tax havens, which
now collectively hide one-sixth of the world's total private wealth.

This is a massive - indeed, fundamental - cause of poverty
in the developing world, yet it does not register in the mainstream definition
of corruption, absent from the UN Convention, and rarely, if ever, appears on
the agenda of international development organisations.

With the City of London at the centre of the global tax
haven web, how does the UK end up with a clean CPI?

The question is all the more baffling given that the City is
immune from many of the nation's democratic laws and free of all parliamentary
oversight. As a result of this special status, the City of London has
maintained a number of quaint plutocratic traditions. Take its electoral process,
for instance: More than 70 percent of the votes cast during council elections
are cast not by residents, but by corporations - mostly banks and financial
firms. And the bigger the corporation, the more votes they get, with the
largest firms getting 79 votes each.

This takes US-style corporate personhood
to another level.

To be fair, this kind of corruption is not entirely out of
place in a country where a feudalistic royal family owns 120,000 hectares of
the nation's land and sucks up around £40m ($65.7m) of public funds each year.
Then there's the parliament, where the House of Lords is filled not by election
but by appointment, with 92 seats inherited by aristocratic families, 26 set
aside for the leaders of the country's largest religious sect, and dozens of
others divvied up for sale to multi-millionaires.

Corruption in US is only slightly less blatant. Whereas
congressional seats are not yet available for outright purchase, the Citizens
United vs FEC ruling allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on
political campaigns to ensure that their preferred candidates get elected, a
practice justified under the Orwellian banner of "free speech".

The poverty factor

The UN Convention is correct to say that poverty in
developing countries is caused by corruption. But the corruption we ought to be
most concerned about has its root in the countries that are coloured yellow on
the CPI map, not red.

The tax haven system is not the only culprit. We know that
the global financial crisis of 2008 was precipitated by systemic corruption
among public officials in the US who were intimately tied to the interests of
Wall Street firms. In addition to shifting trillions of dollars from public
coffers into private pockets through bailouts, the crisis wiped out a huge
chunk of the global economy and had a devastating effect on developing
countries when demand for exports dried up, causing massive waves of
unemployment.

A similar story can be told about the Libor scandal in the
UK, when major London banks colluded to rig interest rates so as to suck around
$100bn of free money from people even well beyond Britain's shores. How could
either of these scandals be defined as anything but the misuse of public power
for private benefit? The global reach of this kind of corruption makes petty
bribery and theft in the developing world seem parochial by comparison.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. If we really want
to understand how corruption drives poverty in developing countries, we need to
start by looking at the institutions that control the global economy, such as
the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the policies that these
institutions foisted on the Global South, following the Washington Consensus,
caused per capita income growth rates to collapse by almost 50 percent.
Economist Robert Pollin has estimated that during this period developing
countries lost around $480bn per year in potential GDP. It would be difficult
to overstate the human devastation that these numbers represent. Yet Western
corporations have benefitted tremendously from this process, gaining access to
new markets, cheaper labour and raw materials, and fresh avenues for capital
flight.

These international institutions masquerade as mechanisms
for public governance, but they are deeply anti-democratic; this is why they
can get away with imposing policies that so directly violate public interest.

Voting power in the IMF and World Bank is apportioned so that developing
countries - the vast majority of the world's population - together hold less
than 50 percent of the vote, while the US Treasury wields de facto veto power.
The leaders of these institutions are not elected, but appointed by the US and
Europe, with not a few military bosses and Wall Street executives among them.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank,
has publicly denounced these institutions as among the least transparent he has
ever encountered. They also suffer from a shocking lack of accountability, as
they enjoy special "sovereign immunity" status that protects them
against public lawsuit when their policies fail, regardless of how much harm
they cause.

Shifting the blame

If these patterns of governance were true of any given
nation in the global South, the West would cry corruption. Yet such corruption
is normalised in the command centres of the global economy, perpetuating
poverty in the developing world while Transparency International directs our
attention elsewhere.

Even if we do decide to focus on localised corruption in
developing countries, we have to accept that it does not exist in a
geopolitical vacuum. Many of history's most famous dictators - like Augusto
Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Hosni Mubarak - were supported by a steady flow
of Western aid. Today, not a few of the world's most corrupt regimes have been
installed or bolstered by the US, among them Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the
warlords of Somalia - three of the darkest states on the CPI map.

This raises an interesting question: Which is more corrupt,
the petty dictatorship or the superpower that installs it? Unfortunately, the
UN Convention conveniently ignores these dynamics, and the CPI map leads us to
believe, incorrectly, that each country's corruption is neatly bounded by
national borders.

Corruption is a major driver of poverty, to be sure. But if
we are to be serious about tackling this problem, the CPI map will not be much
help. The biggest cause of poverty in developing countries is not localised
bribery and theft, but the corruption that is endemic to the global governance
system, the tax haven network, and the banking sectors of New York and London.
It's time to flip the corruption myth on its head and start demanding
transparency where it counts.

(Dr Jason Hickel lectures at the London School of Economics and
serves as an adviser to /The Rules.)

Although there is much weight in my argument (that ‘religion’
is a false category imposed on the diverse cultural and philosophical systems
of the world), am I not unduly “labeling the followers of all Judeo-Christian
faiths, who between them cover the majority of the human species, as being
misled by an invention”?

Another question posed by the senior bureaucrat cited in my
previous post.

The following was my rejoinder to him.

It's not I who is doing the "labeling" of “the followers
of all Judeo-Christian faiths” - it's the imperialists belonging to
Judeo-Christianity and Islam who run a world-wide racket of false labeling of
people, dividing the humanity into 'us' and 'them'.

For instance, Pew Research Center - located in the Western
Christendom (aka The Empire) – runs the worldwide system of labeling of
people according to 'religions', somehow
conjuring up the 'exact' number of 'Christians', 'Muslims', 'Hindus',
Buddhists, 'Sikhs', etc.? (What a
gargantuan fraud!)

It's 'religionists' (i.e. promoters of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) who are responsible for running an abusive
indoctrination system that alienates people – including the captive children
and youth – from their culture and history.

(Look at how Pakistani citizens have long been beating their
chests on complete distortion of their history by Islamists, such as late military dictator Zia-ul-Haq.)

And by 'imperialists belonging to Judeo-Christianity and
Islam', I only mean those few who are at the helm of these abusive systems, not
the billions of ordinary people across the world who are the victims of
religious surveillance-indoctrination-conversion systems.

Those billions are certainly not the “followers” in my view;
they are the unfortunate ‘followed’.

Let the systems of deception, coercion and indoctrination
run by Judeo-Christianity and Islam (with billions of dollars and petro-dollars)
be dismantled, and then we’ll have the true test of their public support.

Let the special privileges and state privilege of the
multi-billion dollar Roman Catholic Church, for example, be ended and then
we'll see what will remain of their putative billion-strong flock.

Let the Saudi fraudsters – the foremost custodians and promoters of Islam –
be prevented from spending their petrodollars on spreading Wahabi-ism (widely
regarded as the most virulent variety of Islam), with the connivance, and often
the support, of their American masters.

Let the 'Islamic' countries put an end to the abuse of their
own people by totalitarian claims made by 'Islam' and cease to pretend that
the 'Muslims' are one Ummah of the faithful as against the rest of
the world.

Let the promoters of Islam acknowledge and reconcile
themselves to the de facto position of the so called 'Muslims' – of their being
divided into a great variety of ethnic groups and States spread across the globe – and refrain from using Islam as an ideological weapon that must supplant the
ethnic values and State influences.

And then we'll see what remains of the putative millions who
are branded as 'Muslims'.

In other words, let the colonial-imperial influence be taken
away from Judeo-Christianity and Islam to create a level playing field vis-à-vis
other 'cultures' - and then we'll see how these 'religions' compete with the
cultural and philosophical systems of the world.

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About Me

Delhi-based journalist, having worked for a business magazine and a news agency.
Also worked as a researcher on local democracy and right to information for an NGO.
Having left my latest employment at a magazine on governance, where I contributed to ideation and wrote on public policy from the perspective of common citizens, in September 2010, I am currently engaged in freelancing.
At the NGO, I participated in a rare experiment in bringing face to face the people and their representatives and officials in the municipal bodies. At the business magazine, I wrote on finance, economy, business, education, healthcare, etc. At the news agency, my longest employer so far, I worked on the business and economy desk, but also did some news reporting and writing. I believe we Indians are going through a very slow but sure democratic awakening, which is due to greater flow of information. We must sustain this process of awakening and help each other out of ignorance. This ignorance enslaves us to the elite that currently handles the levers of power.